Archive for June, 2011

I’m still working on that project for a friend’s birthday, but it’s probably going to take one more day, so I did another ukulele song…. I promise this is the last one for a bit.

This song is another one that just gives you chills when you hear it, and that goes for anyone who hears it, I think! It’s Hallelujah as performed by Jeff Buckley. The youngins might know this one from Shrek as well, but I actually remember when this cover first came out in the mid 90′s. I found the chords for this as well as a helpful video on picking on this site. I changed the chords a bit to suit my skills better, but I think it turned out fine. I realized after I recorded it and then starting listening to it that I started out pretty slowly and got faster and faster throughout the song… whoops. I think it’s not too noticeable when you’re listening to it… just if you listen to it a couple times in a row. But clearly I need to use a metronome…

Well, I was feeling better today… I made it through work with only a slight headache, but then it started getting really bad again on my way home, so I just crashed once I got home. So, I just did a simple sketch for this post on one of my many, many paint chips from work.

I was able to find one that was mostly unmarred except for the holes being ripped out. I just started sketching with a ball-point pen and let the flow of my hand guide me. It started to look like a bowling pin, so I decided to make it a curvy vase instead and added tulips. Then I added a framed mirror and a lamp. Simple, but I like the way the tilted composition of it turned out, although unintentional. Unfortunately, for the life of me I couldn’t get a good picture… so you’ll have to deal with this blurry one.

Sorry this is such a lame post… I just need to go to bed. If it makes it better, I didn’t have energy to make anything other than a can of fruit for dinner

I woke up this morning with the most hellacious migraine. So bad that I called in sick to work, when I really need the extra hours. I slept pretty much all day with my head under a pillow to block out light and then finally woke around 6 and felt 1000 times better! I still have a twinge of a headache, but I think I’m good to go for work tomorrow.

Last night I started working on a project for a friend of mine’s birthday and planned on finishing and posting it today, but it’s a very detail oriented thing, so I didn’t think it would be good for my poor wittle head… Another day! So instead of that, I decided to do another ukulele song. I know, I know… I’ve done a lot of ukulele lately, but I’m just having so much fun with it and am learning so much! I particularly wanted to work on my strumming patterns today, since that’s probably the thing I struggle with the most. I can strum down just fine… it’s the up motion that I absolutely fail at! So I thought about it awhile and remembered that Noah and the Whale’s 5 Years Time had an awesome ukulele part, and is just an amazing, fun song in general! I love how retro feeling that video is… soooo hipster it’s amazing. And then I thought, why don’t I cover the other instruments parts with recorder, so I did! This is the first song where I’ve done both recorder and ukulele, and I imagine there will be many more to come!

I started out by just recording the ukulele by itself without vocals so I could concentrate more on the strumming. I just listened to the song with headphones on so I could get the timing right. It’s very easy chord-wise– the same 4 chords over and over again– but the strumming was more difficult. I didn’t get it exactly the way they do it, but at least I didn’t do all down strums! Kinda proud of myself although I think I changed the strum pattern at the end…. but at least it still fits! Anywho, after that I recorded the main vocal part (up an octave) and tripped of the words some, but I think it was alright except for on the last verse… but I wasn’t too worried about it. Then I recorded to harmony over top of that, then recorder for the whistling, violin, and penny whistle (sort of made up some parts particularly at the end), and finally I recorded a clapping track. I think it turned out pretty good, all things considered!!

This was such a fun song to do that I didn’t mind listening to over and over again to get the parts down. I’m still very behind on posts obviously, so I hope to get them done later this week, and if not, I’ll catch up this weekend.

For this post, I did my take of Radiohead’s Creep with ukulele! Now, I did this song before when I was doing all of those Myspace Karaoke things, but I wasn’t very happy with the way it turned out and it looks like they’ve discontinued the karaoke feature , so I don’t have record of it anyways. Plus, it’s a song that I really, really love. The kind of song you can’t listen to without getting chills, in my opinion anyways.

For this recording I first recorded myself singing and just strumming the chords. I thought I did the strumming in a pretty even rhythm when I did it, but I then recorded another ukulele part plucking out the chord on top of that, and it was clearly not a set tempo… oops. But I think it turned out alright anyways. I then added some effects to the recordings to try and drown out the background fuzz a bit, which was abnormally loud for some reason… Just a heads up: this song has explicit language. I tried to leave it out, but the lyrics I was looking at still had them in it and I kept forgetting, so I ended up dropping the f-bomb a few times… Sorry! (Especially Grandmom and Mimom… ) Anyways, here it is!

I’m actually really, really happy with the way this turned out, awkward tempos and all! I think it’s such an emotion packed song, for me especially, that it’s hard for me not to convey that when I’m singing it. I also think the layering of uke parts makes it even better!

I had hoped to catch up on some posts today, but I’ve had a killer headache all day that feels like the beginnings of a migraine (I recorded this last night late), so many things I planned on didn’t happen today. Hopefully I’ll feel better tomorrow!

Today I decided to document something that I’ve been making a lot lately. My parmesan crusted tilapia! As I think I’ve mentioned before, I recently started Weight Watchers online and have lost around 6 lbs in just a few weeks! Since then, I’ve been on the hunt for low point proteins that I’ll actually enjoy eating a lot and won’t cost me too much. I discovered recently that I love fish (I used to hate it and would force it down when my mom cooked it), particularly when it’s flavorful. So, I went to the grocery store on the hunt for some. Now, I would love to be able to afford all kinds of fresh, wild fish, but it’s not really in the cards for me right now and I never really know what my schedule is like, so it’d be hard to try and eat it in time. Plus, when you’re cooking for one person, buying a bunch of fresh fish would mean eating it for days! Because of all that, I look for a lot of frozen proteins. Well, at my grocery store (Kroger) I found a big bag of frozen tilapia that had each filet individually sealed. Perfect! And it happened to be on sale the day I got it so I probably paid around $0.75 per filet.

At any rate I’ve been experimenting with them in various seasonings. I found a few recipes in the Weight Watchers online forums that used bread crumbs and parmesan cheese, so I tried different combinations until I ended up with this recipe! I openly admit that I’m a bad cook, but I think that just comes from lack of experience. I have no idea what herbs/seasonings go well together or how much to use of anything because I just haven’t cooked that much, so this recipe is sort of a random assortment of things in my pantry, but I think it turns out quite tasty! And it’s only about 5 or 6 Weight Watchers points, depending on how much of the breading you use!

All these measurements are guesstimations and I ended up not needing all of the breading mixture, so if you try this, just eyeball it to where you think you have enough.

Ingredients:

2 6 oz Filets Frozen Tilapia

2 tsp Grated Parmesean Cheese

1 Tbsp Breadcrumbs

1/2 tsp Dehydrated Minced Garlic

1/2 tsp Cumin

1/2 tsp Caraway Seeds

Pinch of Salt

Pinch of Pepper

Pinch of Accent Flavor Enhancer (idk if it actually enhances the flavor, but it doesn’t hurt!)

Thaw tilapia in refrigerator overnight. (Or if you’re in a bit of a rush, you can run cold water over the individual wrapped filets. This is when that wrapping comes in handy… less mess!) Rinse and pat dry. Preheat oven to 425º F

In a plate or flat-bottomed bowl combine all dry ingredients.

Dip the tilapia filets into the mixture coating each side evenly.

Place filets on pan with cooking spray then generously sprinkle the filets with breading mixture until fully coated. (You’ll have some leftover, so I like to save mine in a zip-lock bag in the fridge for next time.) Place pan in center of oven and bake for 15-20 minutes or until top is nicely browned and fish is flaky.

Makes 2 servings.

And there you have it! I usually will eat one for dinner and then reheat the other in the toaster oven at work for about 5 minutes for lunch the next day. Be pre-warned: I love garlic, so if you don’t like garlic breath, or can’t handle that much of it, use less garlic and carry some gum with you! I’ve gotten to where I take my toothbrush/paste with me to work so I don’t breathe ferocious breath into costumers’ faces!

This is a really simple recipe, and easy to adapt to whatever ingredients you have in your pantry. Sometimes if I wanting a little kick, I’ll add some red pepper flakes or hot sauce. It’s entirely up to you!

This week has been absolute hell, so I decided to do a fun song…. El Scorcho by Weezer, who, FYI, is one of my all time favorite bands!!! By the way, don’t you just love how awkward they are in that video? I think it basically is the meaning of the song… awkward puberty years

I found some very easy Ukulele chords for this, but unfortunately I practiced it too many times before recording it, so by the time I got a decent take, my hands were very tired and sore… I botched the bridge pretty badly. So, just bear with me. And I sort of ad-libbed the guitar solo after that, so it’s sort of crazy. And also, I started playing the wrong chord in the end, so it resolved awkwardly… ugh. I’m tired…

I did this very quickly the other night, but couldn’t post it because of the internet issue. It’s my take on the Monkees I’m a Believer. The newer generations probably only think of the version by Smash Mouth for the first Shrek, but I like to think of it’s roots .

Anyways, like I said, I did this very quickly and it was a little low, so forgive the scratchy voice… and the awkward beginning… and end… haha!!

I finally have internet back, so I’m going to try and get a couple of posts in today!! I hate when I get this far behind, but there wasn’t much I could do about it…

Anyways, like the last day’s project, for day 137 I’m going to post some pictures from my trip! These will be of Chicago itself, mostly from the Architectural Boat Tour I took… which was amazing!! I highly recommend that anyone in the city, even for just a couple of hours, go on this tour, particularly if you’re an architecture/design lover like me!! All of these were taken on my Droid and most of them were with the Retro Camera app. There are a ton (and this is after I filtered a bunch out), so I’m making them pretty small and not going to say much about them… that and I forget what about 80% of them were haha!!

These next few are the Trump Tower… which is amazing! The sun behind it made it look very ominous! I wish I had gotten a picture of the base where it looks like it’s floating on pillars!

That last one is my favorite! There were several buildings by Harry Weese who liked to do triangular and rounded shapes and Mies Van Der Rohe who played with variations on the rectangular buildings (and also had some amazing furniture… he’s kind of a god ) just to name a couple. Some of their stuff is in these pics, as well as many others who’s names I’ve forgotten… whoops.

There was another really amazing building designed by Jeanne Gang called the Aqua Tower that was completed in 2010. It’s designed to look like rippling water that’s pulled towards different sights and important parts of Chicago with curved balconies. It’s pretty amazing

These next two pictures are of the Opera House and then the building next to it that was designed to mimic the “throne” shape of the opera house.

And finally, most of the bridges in Chicago were originally designed as draw bridges to let large boats and other water-craft through. These 2 pics are of a bridge that’s always up.

Whew! So many pictures! I had such an amazing time in Chicago and I can’t wait to go back and spending longer than a couple of hours downtown. I know that that the interiors of many of these buildings are just as spectacular as the exteriors!! (and I would probably enjoy the insides even more )

I lied. I didn’t catch up on posts yesterday. In fact, I didn’t post at all. That was because we had another big storm here in Knoxville and it caused over 100,000 power outages. My apartment, as well as my friend’s where I went, was included. I ended up staying with her and then we didn’t get power back until about 4 am. And now I’m home after work and I have power, but it seems my internet is still down. So, no posts just yet. Hopefully tomorrow!

There are many, many people still without power so keep them in your thoughts!

This weekend I went to Chicago/Evanston, IL for my sister’s graduation from Northwestern University. While I was there, I took a lot of pictures of both Evanston and Chicago, and will be posting the Chicago ones tomorrow, but for this post, I’m sharing some pictures of Evanston. I took all of them with the Retro Camera App on my Droid. There’s several, so I’ll just get right to it.

The first set is the Baha’i Temple, which is just ridiculously beautiful and amazing!

This next one is the program at her graduation.

And I took this next picture of the sound clouds at the graduation because I thought it was cool how they reflected everything.

These last pictures are looking out at Lake Michigan on the walking trail at Northwestern.

You can barely see Chicago off in the distance!!

I had a lot of fun on this trip. So much so that I’ve gotten behind on posts. I’ll get caught up tomorrow, hopefully!